The End

Special Delivery

“The SG Special with P-90s that I started out with was basically the cheapest one in the store. It was from a place called Ace Loans in Santa Monica, which became a pretty well-known place for guitars. But at that point it was just a hockshop.

"I knew that they had some guitars in there and pretty good prices. I think it was $190 or something for that SG. Then that got stolen, unfortunately, and I figured I’d try the one with the humbuckers. But I liked them both.”

Beginning Of The End

“We played a place called the London Fog and that was our first residency-type gig. We really used that place to get our live show together. Even though there normally were not very many people there, at least there were some. By the time we got to playing at [celebrated LA club] the Whisky A Go Go we had a pretty good show down.

“The Whisky was just a really cool gig because that was the place to play in LA. All the big groups would come in there and we would be the house band for them. A lot of the record company people would come to the Whisky also, so we got seen by a lot of people that summer.

“So it was as much of a surprise to Ray and John and I, as it was to the audience [when Jim Morrison sang the climactic lyrics to The End for the first time, resulting in the band’s dismissal from the club] because Jim had never put that part in there up until then. So, we were blown away, too.

“Jim had been missing from the first set and we couldn’t find him. So Ray and John went down to the place where he was staying at the Tropicana Motel. He was in the room there – he’d taken too much acid and he was hiding under the bed.

"So they dragged him out, threw him in the shower, like: ‘Come on, man. You’ve got to get up and play.’ So he comes up for the next set and said, ‘I just want to do The End.’ That was the first song of the set, I believe, and yes, it was a watershed moment.”